Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World by Gordon R. Dickson Read Free Book Online

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7
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    As if at some great distance, he heard the door to his room closing behind the policemen and the white-suited man. With a massive effort he turned the great weight of his head with reluctant neck muscles so that he gazed toward the window. The light still filled the sky. He could not see the sun from where he was, but it could not be quite down. He had a few minutes, anyway—maybe more than a few minutes—to do whatever could be done before the broadcast came on to add its soporific influence to the effect of whatever sedative or narcotic they had given him.
    But even as he thought this, the drug was taking hold and blurring his mind so that he could not think, pulling him under. In the end, he went down with it, into unconsciousness, or something like it . . . .
    At first it was only like drowning. But a dry and stifled drowning in which his whole body was held paralyzed, so that he could not struggle or call out. After a while, however, this passed and he became conscious again, but conscious only to the point of being aware that he was dreaming or hallucinating.
    It seemed to him that he was in something like a series of very dimly lit rooms or caverns so far underground that he would die of old age before he could ever reach the surface, even if he could find his way out. The rooms were full of discarded, destroyed, and broken things and with an oppressive atmosphere that transmitted the emotional, rather than the physical, feeling of his being at the center of all possible pressures.
    It was as if he were buried at the center of a universe. A different universe, he thought—but all the things around him rustled and whispered and hurried to assure him that this was the universe he had always known, but now being seen in its true appearance, stripped of all its decorations and paddings of illusory superstitions down to a stark hopelessness of truth.
    The broken and discarded things came clustering around him, whispering at him to give up and agree, and he reached out for some sort of club or stick to beat them off. But everything he picked up broke or crumbled in his hand and was useless. Finally he ran, and for a little while he outdistanced them.
    But he was conscious of the continuing pressure of something inimical—whatever it was that had been behind the things when they had tried to make him give up. He felt it somewhere nearby, and he found himself searching through the underground rooms for it. So he came after a while into a series of rooms where people were drinking, talking, and dancing, as if at a party; but all their talk was in whispers together, and stopped when he came up. Something within him told him that it would be useless to ask them questions—for he heard them sniggering behind his back once he had gone by, as if they knew what he searched for but were sure he could never find it.
    Then, gradually, he became aware that they were all hollow, these people. Men and women alike, they had been scooped out from behind so that merely the front three-quarters of their skin and hair and clothes were left—just enough so that viewed from straight on they appeared to be in the round.
    Gradually as he moved among them—and in spite of the fact that they were mostly very clever at keeping their faces and fronts toward him—he began to catch glimpses of the emptiness behind what was left, like the emptiness of a rock lobster tail once the meat had been taken out of it. Their whispering, heard all together like the sound of dry waves on a desiccated beach in utter darkness, was trying to tell him to give up, to abandon hope, just as had the broken things in the rooms he had passed through earlier.
    Still, even as he ran from the corrosive chorus of their whispering, the illogical conviction formed in him that somewhere, even here, there was a firm weapon that would not crumble when he tried to use it—if he could only find it. And with one firm